Mighty Bear Studios plans NFT games with a focus on fun, not investment

Web3 gaming still has its benefits, if done right with more focus on game quality, veteran developer Simon Davis tells Axios.

Why it’s important: The NFT/Web3/blockchain part of the gaming industry has billions of dollars in investment, but is surrounded by skeptics.

• For some, a lack of hits – and players – is proof that the sector is a dead end, offering a technology that doesn’t inherently make games better.
• For others, including Davis — whose company Mighty Bear just announced a $10 million investment to create a Web3 game — it’s just proof that it’s early days.

What they say: “When we get the first truly world-class experience in Web3 with a low enough barrier to entry and a low level of friction, we will be there,” Davis told Axios.

• Reminder: Web3 games are another way of saying games related to cryptocurrencies. These games often involve the ability to buy and sell in-game items, characters, and lands in the form of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.

Some key issues hold back Web3 games, says Davis.

• Many such games assume that everyone wants to get into crypto or care about it, and require registrations for wallets and acquisition of tokens before playing. The game from Davis’ team, a battle royale called Mighty Action Heroes, will let people access it as a standard free-to-play game, with the option to play with NFT-based gear as an additional option.
• NFT-based games tend to focus on their marketplace and attract players who think investment first, Davis has observed. “To me, it’s not healthy,” Davis says, stressing the need for players to have fun playing them.

Davis is hopeful that Web3 could change the funding of games and even improve the relationship between developers and players.

• Teams that make standard free-to-play games need to constantly create new content that they then push players to buy, he says. It “basically puts the studio at odds with the players.” (Davis has been working in free-to-play for years).
• For a Web3 game like his, Davis believes a team can forgo that model and sustain itself by taking a cut of the sales of in-game items that players sell to each other. For his game, these items can be cosmetics or rewards that you otherwise get through playing Battle Royale’s seasons.
• Can it be done without crypto, given years of experimentation with in-game marketplaces in games like Diablo? Davis argues that transaction tracking and profit sharing are ideally done with Web 3 technology. “I could send a postcard instead of sending an email,” he said. “But it’s not necessarily the best tool for that.”

What will be next: A playable version of Mighty Action Heroes should be released by the end of the year.

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